Teaching at school today

To teach in complex, difficult, unfavorable and critical contexts.... These
terms explain the different ways in which we name the current conditions in
which we, as teachers, have to carry out, ahead of the transmission of a
symbolic and cultural universe to the new generations. What do we talk about
when we say that today the teachers are faced with the challenge of educating
in critical contexts? Which are the contexts? How are they currently
visualized? What is the complexity in our present? Where is its
difficulty?
The complexity of this time lies in that, mainly, the dense complexity of
multiple and varied transformations, social, political, natural and economic
transformations that have undertaken private features in the different Latin
American countries.
Thus, the current societies are faced with old and new problems that ,
of course, do not affect the same mood to all the countries and regions.
These problems involve, among other matters, the deepening of the
inequity in the distribution of the wealth, the weaknesses of the
national states in the regulation of the social order , the reconfiguration
of the hierarchies and relations of the power among the central countries
and the peripheric, dramatical changes in the world of work that brought
the dissolution of the social protections for a wide set of the population
and with that, an increase in the great percentages of unemployed, the
acuteness of the poverty and the gap between poor and wealthy ones. In
other words, it is about the stress of the processes of social fragmentation that
is evident in the provision of great sectors of the population to extreme
situations of exclusion and social vulnerability.
In these conditions of social inequality, the subjects are faced before the
urgency of organizing their lives on the day to day, in situations of deep
uncertainty about what shall come. The future is submitted as a difficult
time to project on. Then, some questionings over the frames of
references that guided us were produced, together with
this, a loss of horizons that made us to face he challenge of constructing other
references and senses.
In this scenario, the school has remained unaltered. On the contrary, the
consequences and the effects of the transformations before mentioned deeply
interrogate them. What is the role of schools in the transformation of the
painful present we now live in? Which are its social roles in this turbulent and
complex context? Which are the answers and the conceptions we have over
the occupation of teaching in the present? Which are the tools that we, the
teachers, have to teach in contexts of acute social gap between poor and
wealthy people?
Let’s begin to answer these questions by situating, in the first place, how is
that school is part of the social landscape. We cannot forget that school is a
relatively recent institution. It is installed as a compulsory space a little more
than one hundred years ago, in a context of consolidation of the national
states, that tried o alphabetized at the same time to make them visible in an
heterogeneous population. The school authorized and consolidated, at the
same time, an specific way of teaching, coherent with other institutions of the
society that was able to be effective and replace previous forms of
transmission of culture. Then, we shall be able to find out what is this specific
form about, what is it that made sense to its expansion and universalization,
what was the logic that operated and which are the transformations that it has
been suffering in the last years. (Extracted fasciculus: "Las condiciones de enseñanza en contextos críticos", María Silvia Serra-Evangelina Canciano)

Source: http://www.porlainclusionmercosur.educ.ar/mat_educativos/txt_pedagogicos.htm